Re: NIST proposes software key escrow development

[doug@netcom.com (Doug Merritt)]

Brad Huntting <huntting@glarp.com> said:
>> And even hardware solutions can be reverse engineered. In fact, it's
>
>Why?  The easiest way to foil SlipJack is to simply run another
>encryption mechanism on top of it.

Because we weren't (just then) talking about foiling it, we were talking
about whether it could be figured out. Unless I misunderstood the discussion
from careless reading, the point seemed to be that they wanted to make
the workings of the chip secret.

I was furthmore assuming that there would be motivation for people to
figure out such secrets because it would help them do their own illicit
decryptions, but that's getting slightly off subject.

>> I'm reasonably happy with what the NSA appears to be doing in regard to
>> foreign intelligence gathering; it's their domestic agenda that threatens
>> the constitution. But that's in the nature of spook organizations.
>
>I dont know about you, but many of my best friends are "foreigners",
>and many of them live in riskier situations than I do (both in the
>US and abroad).  Their need for privacy is at least as pressing as
>mine.  The argument that "we" can abuse the rights of "foreigners"
>is nationallistic at best and jingoistic at its worst.

That's not what I said. The charter of the NSA isn't to abuse the rights
of your foreign friends. Now that you've raised the subject, I wouldn't
be happy with the NSA doing so, either. I have friends outside the U.S.
too. I just meant that countries do intelligence gathering on each other
all the time as a matter of course, and most of that isn't abusive in
nature, it's just the usual game of politics and defense etc.

But I suppose it's silly of me to say something like that on a list with
so many rabid paranoids; how could I possibly imagine that not *every*
act of the NSA is inherently ***EVIL***!?

Sigh.
	Doug